This week, Huffington Post launched an Arabic-language website run by two loyal supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the Islamist parent organization of Hamas. Alex Rowell writes:

[P]resumably, few readers . . . will have expected the liberal American media juggernaut to launch a venture headed by two prominent figures of the Middle East’s religious right.

[The site’s editor-in chief, Anas] Fouda, previously an executive producer at Al Jazeera Arabic (AJA), is managing the website in partnership with his old boss, the former AJA director general, Wadah Khanfar. Their profiles may make for interesting perusal for existing Huffington Post readers unfamiliar with the Arabic-language media landscape.

An Egyptian national now living in Turkey, Fouda was arrested in the United Arab Emirates in 2013 on suspicion of affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (MB)—an affiliation which he freely admitted had existed since 1988, though he claimed to have held no formal party role since 1995. A browse of his Twitter timeline shows his politics to be fairly bread-and-butter MB; recommending, for instance, articles praising “His Eminence” Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Holocaust-revisionist cleric who routinely denounces Shiite and Alawite Muslims, to say nothing of Jews. Indeed, Fouda has himself on occasion found less than obliging things to say about his Semitic cousins. . . .

Khanfar, however, is the heavyweight of the pair; the man who made Al Jazeera the titan of Arabic media that it is today. He’s also, according to ex-colleagues, the man who made Al Jazeera the Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece that it is today.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.